The trouble with war

One of the troublesome side effects of war is that you very quickly run out of stuff.  South Sudan is running out of lots of things, most notably money.  The exchange rate is going north by the day - your $100 bill would get you 350 South Sudanese Pounds a month ago and now you're looking at close to 500.

Juba is also experiencing a severe shortage of fuel, which logistically speaking is the bread and butter of almost all organisations, and a severe shortage of actual bread and butter.  I passed a bakery this evening and it was like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1985.  A lack of butter is turning people to Blue Band Margarine, a disgusting Ugandan margarine substitute made of petroleum jelly and ear wax.

I was in the town of Bentiu, close to the border, a couple of weeks ago, but we had to leave because the North kept bombing the town.  They chose some strange targets, including the market and various fields, but since they drop the bombs by having soldiers push them out the back of Antonov cargo aircraft I guess they aren't very accurate.

No one seems to know what is going on at the border now.  It's hard to imagine either side winning a war,  considering the state of the two economies.  Sudan at least has a few planes, but they are so old and Russian that they can't fly from Khartoum to Juba without a stop for fuel and repairs along the way.  South Sudan doesn't have two planes to rub together, although I heard a rumour that they have one.

Another unfortunate consequence of war is that the UN have filled our football field with tanks, in an awesome show of power that will have no effect since everyone knows that UN peacekeepers are far too busy playing volleyball and being bad at DJing to leave their compound.

I'm off to Thailand tomorrow on R&R for two weeks, so prepare yourself for tedious jokes about prostitutes when I return.

Bentiu - for real

There are 20,000 Nuban refugees hanging around at a camp in Yida just south of the border, and the UN is trying to move them fifty miles south where they will be less in the middle of a battlefield.  The trouble with refugees is that you can’t just load them into the back of a pickup and move them – they have to move of their own accord.  The particular trouble with these refugees is that they are mountain folk who want to stay close to their mountains for fear of disorientation, so they are not at all keen to come south.  The UN is trying to lure them south with the promise of schools in Nyiel and a university in Pariang, and our job is to make those facilities irresistible.




A bit of Nyiel Refugee Camp, waiting for refugees



We are based in Bentiu and going by road through the oilfields to those sites when the road is safe and no one is dropping bombs on it.  It’s a 6 hour round trip to Pariang, which is almost as bad a commute as people who use British Rail in the winter experience, and a 3 hour one to Nyiel, which feels round the corner in comparison.

I sat in on a P5 health and hygiene lesson in Nyiel, where we learnt about washing our hands and sang some songs.  Half the school is housed in temporary longhouses, divided into four classrooms by plastic sheets.  My class concentrated well and weren’t too distracted by my presence, but close to me was a hole in the sheet and children from the nursery class were taking it in turns to peer through it in wonder and disgust.  Every so often they were yanked away by some unseen and no doubt exasperated teacher, but more kids would take their place at the peephole.  Eventually an enormous bottom appeared and filled the hole, as the teacher sensibly used herself as a plug, and her class were once again able to concentrate.




Nyiel refugee camp urchins



The camp in Nyiel is nice, but there’s only about 1,000 people there.  Rows of empty tents sit waiting.  The UN have installed a very nifty solar powered pump that fills a raised bladder; when taps in the camp are opened, gravity causes the water to flow out and the pump refills the bladder provided that it’s sunny, which is a reasonable assumption.



Nifty pump in Nyiel

 The Easter weekend in Bentiu was not full of incident, although we did eat caviar brought from Moscow by a UN pilot and threw a rugby ball about in front of bemused locals.





Bentiu Grand Hotel - two out of three ain't bad



Bentiu - nearly

I'm writing this from Bentiu, capital of Unity state, or I would be if someone didn't keep dropping bombs on it.  The UN and the NGOs are evacuating most of their staff today so my trip will have to wait till Tuesday next week, when we'll try again.

Observers of events in these parts over the last 50 years will know that these guys don't need an excuse to fight, but this time they have one.  The black South and the arab North are going at it again for control of the Heglig oil field, and its all-crucial Central Processing Facility.  All oil from South Sudan goes through the north as that's where the only pipeline goes, and two months ago the South took its ball home and turned off the pumps as it was convinced the north was siphoning it off along the way.  Holding the CPF would be a good way to do a similar siphoning trick as all the oil from north and south goes through it.

Seeing as 98% of South Sudan's revenue is from oil, its sulking raises two major questions.  How will it now feed its people, and where the hell did the other 2% come from?  The first question is moot as South Sudan has never bothered to feed its people, preferring to splash out on heavy artillery.  As for the second question, my visa must have contributed a hefty portion, as it's $100 just to set foot in the country.  I imagine that import duty on ministerial Hummers has been significant too.  Of course, technically they can't charge you for importing things because they haven't got around to writing any laws yet but that's another story.

Weapons

There are rather a lot of weapons in South Sudan; this is what you get when you host a war for the best part of fifty years.  If anyone wants an AK47, I can get you one for the going rate of $13.  The government has been carrying out disarmaments recently.  This is an invitation for everyone to bury all but one of their guns in the bush, and hand over the one that's left, on the basis that no one could possibly have more than one.  This assumption has led to unfortunate incidents where people have been beaten up by soldiers for not handing over a gun, when they didn't have one in the first place.  Last week in the town of Bor the army even disarmed the police, who are supposed to be armed, and had to re-arm them after a hasty phone call.

There are lots of land mines and UXOs (unexploded ordnance) on the Jebel, the rather pretty hill on the outskirts of Juba that people climb when they can't think of anything better to do with their sunday.  This is not because mines were planted there during the war.  In fact, a couple of years ago the government gathered all the mines and UXO they could find around Juba and put it in a pile on the Jebel.  They then tossed on a lot of sticks of dynamite, hoping that a controlled explosion would be the result.  What actually happened was that several tons of explosives were blown into the air, and rained down all over the mountain.  A de-miner actually lost a leg, not because he trod on a mine but because a mine fell from the sky onto his leg.  It didn't even explode.  Anyway, hikers on the Jebel would be well advised to take a companion and follow in their footsteps a few paces behind, ready to turn back in case the companion suddenly travels a long way in a vertical direction.

Health - a rebuttal

I've had complaints that this blog makes South Sudan sound like a bit of a lark and that it's all swimming in the river and playing with kittens.  A while ago a well-respected commentator wrote that 'there are so many twenty-something Americans working at places like Save the Children that Juba feels like a giant frat party.'  I will not confirm or deny this - I will however write a bit about disease in the hope of garnering some sympathy for my situation.

It is not easy staying healthy here.  The bugs and the bacteria bask in the hot, wet climate, and all of the sane doctors left years ago to work somewhere they would get paid, leaving the other kind of doctors.  If we get ill we head to one of the small private clinics which are expensive but preferable to the state-run Juba Teaching Hospital.  I passed an unpleasant hour there on an errand and saw the biggest rat I have ever seen in one of the wards (it may have been a squirrel).  I heard of a boy who was hit by a car, taken to JTH and given an official report of his condition that said 'he has a fever, and a headache in the buttocks'.

We are pretty used to our colleagues turning strange colours and missing days of work.  Malaria is endemic - at any one time at least one of my colleagues is usually struggling with it.  Generally you can zap it with drugs in a couple of days, but it's a good excuse to be miserable in the office.  Typhoid is another favourite; so many people come back with it from one of our field bases that they must hand it out at the door.

Another health hazard is the Nairobi Fly.  This is a small red and black thing that behaves like a fly in all respects, but if you swat it then it explodes in a shower of acid that leaves horrific blisters on your skin for days.  This is what would have happened if someone had swatted the Alien in that film, and I can confirm that the terror that greets a swarm of Nairobi flies is comparable to that experienced by the crew of that space ship.

About two years ago we had a visit from the internal audit department in London.  One of the auditors had a miserable week in middle-of-nowhere Waat, struck down by various ailments.  While waiting for the plane to take him back to health and civilisation he had to dash to the loo, and the plane landed and took off while he was there so he had to wait a week for the next one.  South Sudan has become a bogey land to people at HQ, something like a cross between Timbuktu and the Bermuda Triangle, and stories abound of giant fire-breathing snakes, flesh-eating diseases contracted from public transport and murderous bacteria that creep into kitchens and lie quietly among the breakfast things.  When I was last visiting the office in London I did nothing to dispel these rumours.

Christmas in South Sudan

Another Christmas been and gone and I can't remember what it's like anywhere else.  Concessions to the holiday season in Juba have been few - a few decorations here and there and a creepy-looking Father Christmas by a roundabout being guarded by a camoflage-clad soldier.

I'm surprised the government has a soldier spare to look after old Santa, as the youth of the Nuer tribe have spent the last week launching attacks on the neighbouring Murle in Jonglei state and someone really needs to go and tell them to show a bit of festive spirit and stop it.

It hasn't been a very jolly week for security staff in Juba.  Five days ago someone shot two of our guards in the leg and stole one of our land-cruisers right outside the office in front of several onlookers.  One of the guards was told by his employer to report to work at my guest house later that evening and never mind the hole in his leg, until someone interceded on his behalf for clemency.  And on Christmas Eve three women were shot dead just around the corner, with the result that the streets were so awash with AK-47 waggling policemen that many of us couldn't get to our Christmas parties.

For me Christmas Day involved a BBQ on the banks of the Nile, shisha, party games and a Chinese-made inflatable reindeer with the price written on its face in indelible marker.

Also occupying my time these days is a 4-week old kitten who is halfway through a fortnight in my custody, and who is making exciting strides in the areas of eating solid food, chasing mouse-like objects, leaping into yawning chasms and going to the lavatory.

Diani

They say that lightning doesn't strike twice; this doesn't apply to very tall metal objects, so our radio mast got done again a while back, knocking out the internet connection just after it had been fixed after the last lightning strike.

I've just returned from holiday at Diani Beach, on the part of the Kenyan coast that isn't constantly being raided by men with eye patches and parrots on their shoulders.  We stayed at an amazing hotel where more or less the only residents were various Save the Children staff, a tame bush baby who liked to sit on people's heads in the belief that he was atop a small, leafless tree and a wicked monkey who leapt on the table at breakfast and filled his pockets with bananas and half-eaten pieces of toast.

After the stress of being in Juba or in the midst of the disaster response in the Horn of Africa we were pretty set on recharging batteries, so our days didn't involve much more than lying in hammocks perfecting our impressions of those sloths that move so slowly that moss grows in their fur.

We had a couple of entertaining nights out at Forty Thieves beach bar, but I'm afraid how the two male members of the party woke up in bed together wearing pretty floral dresses will have to remain a mystery to you all.

Bush baby on branch of small, leafless tree